Providing support for a WordPress-related product? This could make your life easier!

I have been providing support for almost four years till now, worked for companies developing custom themes/plugins for WordPress, my daily workflow was as simple as replying to the ticket/thread and making the customer happy! So, I make use of some nice tricks that I would like to share here, perhaps someone else would find them helpful as well!

I use “Stylish” chrome extension, which allows me to write some styles for the forums page I work on, how good is your CSS level is the only limit here, you can write snippets to filter (resolved, replied, not-replied) threads only by looking at them!Example from Themify support forums, code snippet used.

​I use “Tampermonkey” chrome extension, which allows me to write custom scripts to be executed on the forums, for example:

This little snippet will automatically insert “Hi + username, ” on any forum thread reply, so I can easily avoid spelling mistakes while writing usernames and avoid copy/paste.

Also, another helpful snippet to detect if the thread got replied while being opened as a tab in chrome? I open about 20 tabs and begin working on them one by one, sometimes one of my workmates would kindly reply to one of these opened threads as tabs, this script refresh the thread link every minute in the background and watch for the last reply if it has any significant string from the support team “@ Themify”, in this case, it will pop-up a JavaScript alert telling me this thread was replied before.

I use “Lazarus” chrome extension as a form-data recovery solution. It’s really helpful in case your page crashed while typing a long reply, you will always have a back-up of what you wrote.

I use any “Clipboard History” tool, for example “Parcellite” on Linux, but I’m sure you can find similar tools for different OSs you are using, this tool keeps history of all your (CTRL+C) entries, so no worries if you copied something over something else, you can easily get it back.

If you have a repository for all your themes/plugins, and you want to use them on a local WordPress version and keep them synced whenever you push an update to the repo, you can make use of symlinks on Linux (and I’m pretty sure it will work on macOS too), following these steps should achieve that:

On your localhost machine, use terminal to navigate to this path:

localhost_www_path/wp-content/

and delete the default WordPress themes/plugins folders then run this command:

sudo ln -s ~/path_to_repo/ plugins

Then, the same for themes:

sudo ln -s ~/path_to_repo/ themes

Now, WordPress will read Themes/Plugins from your repository, once you update the git by pulling updates, you will have the WordPress plugins/themes updated in localhost. 😉

The final step is to make your web server (assuming Apache) the owner of the repository folder, so that it can read/write files from this directory, to do that, run this command:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data ~/path_to_repo/*

Because of this user permissions change, if you run “git pull” from the terminal, you will need to use “sudo git pull” instead, because the files’ owner has been changed.

That’s it for now, but I’ll keep updating this post whenever a new trick comes to my mind as I think I’ll continue providing support for WordPress for another couple of years or something!